The Seamstress (17 page)

Degas stopped pacing. He lifted his head. Whether he’d finished reading the message or grown accustomed to the clatter of the sewing machine and was stunned by the sudden silence, Emília did not know. He looked into the sewing room window. The shutters were open; the thin cotton curtain drawn back. Emília was in plain view. Degas walked to the windowsill.

“Ahh,” he sighed. “My savior. My horsewoman.”

Emília sat. She leaned into the machine and went back to work, feverishly pumping the iron pedal. When she looked up, Degas was gone. Emília kept sewing for fear he would notice the silence and come back. Her fingers felt hot. Her throat constricted. His savior. His horsewoman. She had never been claimed before, not by a farmer or a gentleman. It was brazen, audacious. Something a spoiled child would say. It angered her—she was no horsewoman—and yet she felt comfort in the claim. To be claimed meant to exist outside of the sewing room, outside of her dark, empty house, and to have a place in the mind of a man she did not know.

The next day, Degas propped his thick forearms on the windowsill and watched her work. The next week, he leaned against the sewing room’s door frame. Emília began to listen for his steps on the tile. She waited for Degas to clear his throat and announce his presence before she looked up and saw his gummy smile. Eventually, Degas made his way into the sewing room. He sat in a chair opposite the Singer. He spoke little at first, complaining of his boredom, his wish to return to Recife. Emília slowed her pedaling and listened. Perhaps it was Emília’s eager silence, or the heat, or the dull monotony of his days, or the constant hypnotizing clatter of the Singer, that loosened Degas’ tongue. Or perhaps, Emília thought afterward, he simply liked to talk about himself.

He was thirty-six. He had no siblings. His father had been trained as a doctor but came from a long line of moneylenders and merchants who sold imported machines to sugar plantations. His mother’s family, the van der Leys, had owned one of those plantations. When the price of sugar fell, they could not pay for their machines. They engaged their daughter, Dulce, to the young merchant and their debts were forgiven. As a boy, Degas had gone to boarding school in England. Emília recalled the island on Padre Otto’s map. He traveled by steamship. At the boarding dock in the port of Recife, his parents had pinned his name to his jacket, but during the long trip, the pin had come undone and Degas was petrified he would be lost forever.

When Degas spoke of his travels, Emília wanted to stop pedaling altogether, but she was afraid of startling Degas from his stories. Degas described snow, and how the extreme cold could feel just like extreme heat—a tingling, painful sensation against your skin. He described the watery oats he ate each morning in the boarding school’s dining hall. He recalled how the British boys had tormented him, calling him a “dirty gypsy” because of his nose and his complexion.

“Why?” Emília interrupted. “Is everyone there pink? Like Padre Otto?”

Degas leaned his head back and laughed. Emília tugged a loose thread from the Singer’s needle. She chided herself for asking such a question. She arranged her feet on the pedal, but before she could begin, Degas reached toward the machine. He placed his hand over hers.

“You’re quite lovely,” he said.

Unlike Professor Célio’s fingers, Degas’ were thin and brown. His hand was moist with sweat. Cupped over hers, it felt hot. Emília tried to slip her hand away, hoping he would continue his story. With her first, slight tug, Degas’ smile faded. His face had a way of suddenly darkening, his good humor disappearing so abruptly that it seemed as if it had never truly existed, that the real Degas was not a charming, worldly man but the grim, dejected figure who lay underneath. He shifted in his chair, as if uncomfortable in his starched suit. There was a childlike earnestness, a flicker of desperation in his eyes that stilled Emília. She wanted, suddenly, to put him at ease. She kept her hand beneath his.

“The women in Recife are tigresses,” he continued. “They’ve got nothing in their heads but gossip and secrets. They are cunning. But you”—he squeezed her hand tightly—“you are sweet, like a child. A beautiful child.”

From that evening forward, Degas waited for her beside the kitchen door, among the dripping laundry and slumped sacks of cornmeal, and escorted her home. During their walks, he held her sewing bag in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other. He smoked quickly, taking a few long puffs and then throwing the half-finished stub a few paces from their feet. As they negotiated the road’s crooked cobblestones, Emília admired Degas’ two-toned leather shoes. As the evenings grew warmer and the summer began, dust settled on his shoes and their patent-leather tips grew dull, like the shells of beetles.

She did not feel giddy or nervous around Degas, as she had with Professor Célio. She never had the urge to take Degas’ hand or brush back his hair. She never felt warmth rise in her stomach when he came near. Apart from the instance in the sewing room, he, too, never tried to take her hand. He never walked too close. Never stared at her when he believed she wasn’t looking. At night, when Emília could not sleep because her bed felt too empty and the house too quiet, she tried to conjure up romantic daydreams about Degas, but his full frame and gummy smile intruded upon her musings, making her recall other images: Degas pressing a water glass to his broad forehead; Degas discreetly plucking a stray thread from the shoulder of her dress; Degas removing a poorly folded handkerchief from Felipe’s jacket pocket, refolding it, and gently tucking it back into place.

As summer began, the banana palms lost most of their fronds, making Taquaritinga’s serra look brown and barren. Some evenings, during their walks, Emília saw farmhouses, white and smaller than fingernails, perched upon the mountainside. On these summer evenings, when the sun set slowly and their shadows fell long and distorted before them, Emília wanted to interrupt their quiet walks and tell Degas: “My sister had a bent arm. People called her Victrola.”

She never told him this. When Degas finally asked about her family, Emília told him they were dead. Being a gentleman, he didn’t ask for details. She assumed Degas had heard about Luzia’s abduction, but she wasn’t sure. The colonel didn’t like to broadcast his failings, especially to a guest he did not like. Felipe had been in the capital when the cangaceiros invaded. Most likely the colonel’s son knew about the abduction, but with his cool disdain for Taquaritinga it was possible Felipe didn’t recall Victrola or associate her with being Emília’s sister. And the town itself avoided mentioning Luzia, as if speaking her name would call forth a ghost that would haunt them all. It was as if her sister had never existed, had never walked those streets beside Emília, had never broken a boy’s teeth with her skull, had never fallen from that mango tree. Emília only spoke of Luzia to Padre Otto. Each week, she sat within the cramped confessional and stared at the priest’s profile through the latticed wood. She confided that she slept in Aunt Sofia’s bedroom. That she had pinned a curtain across her old bedroom’s doorway because she felt sick with shame each time she looked inside and saw Luzia’s things: undergarments made of sturdy fabric, a pair of thick stockings, a shawl that could have kept her sister warm, if only Emília had packed it. Although they plagued her, Emília never shared these thoughts with Degas. One evening, however, she spoke of the pile of mil-réis beneath her bed.

“People don’t believe it,” she said to Degas, “but one day, I will go to the city. I will have a seamstress of my own.”

She slowed her stride and lowered her voice to a whisper. One day, Emília confided, she would have a tiled kitchen. She would eat fresh beef. She would own a cloche hat. She would honk a car’s horn.

Degas stared at her. The corners of his mouth twitched. He covered it with his hand but could not stifle his laughter. Emília stepped away from him. It was easy for Degas to laugh at such things. He had a dress shirt for each day of the week; Emília had seen them, perfumed and immaculate, lined up in the laundry area like a row of Padre Otto’s altar boys in their stiff white robes. Degas would never have to scrub sweat stains from his clothing each night. Degas had the luxury of leaving food on his plate, which Dona Conceição’s maids later ate, when their patroness wasn’t looking. Emília used to be unwilling to eat scraps, but after Aunt Sofia’s death hunger overcame her pride and she, too, picked up the half-eaten slices of cake and the fatty rinds of picanha steak. There were things that, Emília knew, Degas never took into account: the leather laces on his shoes, the soft fabrics of his clothing, the silk tags sewn into each of his hats with the address of a milliner on Rua do Sol. What seemed trivial things to Degas were, to Emília, vital clues to another world, a world to which she wanted admittance. But each month, train fares rose. Each month Emília had to recalculate the time and effort it would take for her to raise the money for her ticket. By October, the train ticket was becoming just like Dona Conceição’s silk dresses, her intricate laces, her silver utensils: things so near Emília, but always beyond her reach.

Degas’ laughter faded. He dabbed his eyes with a handkerchief. Emília grabbed her sewing bag from his hands.

“No,” Degas said, his smile suddenly disappearing. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to laugh.” He fumbled with his hands, then continued. “It’s your innocence that strikes me, Emília. Your simplicity. It refreshes me. It makes me see everything with new eyes.”

Emília nodded and allowed Degas to escort her home.

By late October, there was vicious gossip about their unchaperoned walks. “You’re earning a reputation,” comadre Zefinha said angrily. “What would your aunt say?” Emília ignored her. There was no harm in their walks. Everyone saw Degas leave her at her door and then return to the colonel’s house. But still they asked, what would a city man, a university student, possibly want with a pretty orphan? The women at the market thought they knew, and they gossiped loudly each time Emília passed their booths: “That girl won’t be able to show her sheets on her wedding night.” If Luzia were present, she would have confronted the women and said something clever. Emília simply walked away, her hands shaking, her face flushed. Comadre Zefinha was right—the evening walks were risking her already troubled reputation—but Emília didn’t care. She didn’t try to guess Degas’ intentions; after the incident with Professor Célio, Emília wouldn’t allow herself to have romantic expectations or to make physical advances. Only men, it seemed, had those rights. Still, Emília harbored intentions of her own. One day she would go to the capital, and she had to know what awaited her there. The walks with Degas allowed Emília to hear his stories, to soak in his perceptions of city life, to create a mental portrait of Recife and beyond.

In response to the gossip, the colonel wanted to put an end to their evening strolls but Dona Conceição calmed him. She suggested that they provide a chaperone for Emília’s walks, and when the colonel assented, she winked at Emília. With that wink, Emília understood that her walks with Degas were more than walks. Dona Conceição was her senior and her patroness, but she was also a woman who understood both the risks and the possibilities that those walks represented. Dona Conceição was willing to gamble on possibility. From then on, Felipe accompanied the couple, sulking behind them, kicking at rocks, huffing each time Degas laughed. With a chaperone present, their walks turned into something official. Neither Emília nor Degas spoke of the change.

On the first day of November, Degas stopped halfway through their evening walk. They stood in the town square. He took off his hat. The hair beneath it was wispy and thin, like a baby’s.

“I’ve received a telegram from my father,” Degas said. “The university strike is over. I must go back.”

Degas waited for a reaction. Emília tried to muster feelings, but there was only calm. It startled her, how little she would miss him. Degas looked nervously behind them, at Felipe. He was busy lighting a cigarette. The match in his hand flared. The day’s last rays of sun illuminated his face. Felipe’s freckles had darkened that summer, after many horse rides and badminton games with Degas. It looked as if cinnamon had been sprinkled across his face, fanning across his forehead, clotting densely on his cheeks and nose. Felipe squinted in the sunlight, then turned his back. Quickly, Degas took Emília’s hand. She’d allowed him to hold it once before, in the sewing room, but that was a private place and not the public square. Emília recalled the women at the market, gossiping about her sheets. She tugged her hand away.

Degas shrugged, as if he had tried his hand at romance but could not fathom it.

“Emília,” he sighed, “I lost the ability to make castles out of air long ago. You and I, we both have necessities. You need to leave here, and I need…”

His voice lowered. He gripped her hand again, tighter this time. He breathed heavily and it smelled of tobacco. Emília felt dizzy.

“I will return to the capital,” Degas said. “And if you accept, you will come with me. It will be more than a visit. You will go as my wife.”

The sun had nearly disappeared over the horizon. Emília heard birds fly from the square, their flapping wings like the sound of good, stiff fabric snapping on a laundry line. Behind Degas, she saw the shadow of Felipe’s face. The lit end of his cigarette glowed. She heard him exhale and smoke swirled around them.

“You will go as my wife,” Degas repeated, louder this time.

Emília nodded.

Later that week, after the entire town had heard the news of their engagement and Degas had sent and received a dozen telegrams to and from his parents in Recife, Emília went to see Padre Otto. She had her confession to make and a ceremony to schedule. She and Degas would travel as man and wife. The rumor in Taquaritinga was that Degas had ruined her, and in order to keep the town’s honor—they couldn’t have city boys visiting and seducing their daughters—the colonel had forced his guest to marry immediately. Degas did not dispel the rumor. Neither did Emília; her reputation was not as important as her escape. She admitted this during her confession to Padre Otto.